The rest of the work week unrolled with more disappointments. Sanjay asked to meet with me one-on-one and said he was going to transition my main responsibility at GM to platform-as-a-service, which meant coding tools and services for other engineers to use to build self-driving car software, rather than building the self-driving car software myself. “Think about the impact you’ll have, bro,” he said, “it’ll be like everyone is relying on you.” On Thursday night, I stayed in and checked Samarkand a bunch of times, but Vivian was offline. I thought about how I needed to get out more—maybe pick up a new hobby. On Friday night, I went to karaoke with Daniel, Tony, and Jeffrey and passed out on my couch before my DoorDash KFC arrived.
But on Saturday morning, Vivian called again.
“Hey. I decided to stay longer. Are you free for dinner tonight?”
I was ecstatic—not just to see her again, but by the faint possibility that she’d decided to stay because of me. I took her to an Italian restaurant called Sotto Mare in North Beach where we had cioppino, wedge salad with blue cheese dressing, mussel steamers, and seafood risotto. She was wearing a dress and makeup this time, which increased my confidence that I was not mistaking this interaction for a date. During dinner, we talked about Samarkand threads and I learned that she’d studied computer science at UCL and lived in Hong Kong. She answered only the questions she felt like answering and still wouldn’t tell me what she did for a living or why she was in San Francisco in the first place. I didn’t press her, fearful of breaking the spell that temporarily held her at the table across from me.
After dinner, in an attempt to prolong the evening, I suggested a drink at the Top of the Mark, which Vivian reluctantly agreed to. It was a glass-walled cocktail lounge on the nineteenth floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in Nob Hill, some 305 feet above sea level. We stayed there for forty minutes listening to the jazz pianist and looking out the window from our corner, which faced Alcatraz and the Pacific. I told Vivian that story everyone knows about the Top of the Mark, which is that this was where the American soldiers went with their wives during World War II for a last drink and dance before they shipped out to the Pacific Theater; the next morning, the women would gather back at the bar to watch their husbands sail off together on the same ship. Those who returned reunited with their wives in the same place. I couldn’t tell whether or not Vivian liked this story. She only finished half of her drink, then suddenly announced that she had to get home. While saying goodbye I couldn’t get myself to ask about her itinerary. As I tossed and turned in bed later that night, I realized that I’d let myself get my hopes up.
Luckily, she only made me wait three days before calling again. We met for oysters that evening at Waterbar and a late-night bike ride along the Embarcadero. She wore a thick gray cardigan with sleeves that were too long. I wondered what she had been doing the past three days but didn’t ask. At the end of the night, she told me in a cautious tone that she was considering staying in San Francisco for a bit longer than planned. Soon after that, we settled into a rhythm where I saw her about once a week. I’d text her with plans a couple days in advance and steep in anxiety for a day or two to receive an “okay” or a “sounds good.” I spent a lot of time between meetings strategizing about places to take her, stories I could tell her—whatever was needed to sustain her interest. There was something Scheherazadian about this situation, except instead of killing me when she got bored, she would just ghost me.
So we dined at Monsieur Benjamin and ate steak tartare, baked brie, and duck confit. I got us lost deep inside Golden Gate Park and she navigated us back to the trailhead without looking at her phone. I took her to climb Twin Peaks, which she said reminded her of the hills in Hong Kong. When we got to the top, I took my phone out to take a picture of her by the Sutro Tower, but she told me not to.
I soon realized that even though we were spending more time together, I was approaching an asymptote in my understanding of Vivian. Past a certain point, everything was closed off. She struck me as someone who had very few close friends. I never saw her text or call anyone. There was a faintly aloof, even antisocial quality about her.
The excursions sapped my attention at work. I was not at all enjoying my new role and started responding more slowly, sometimes not at all, to Sanjay’s emails. No one reprimanded me for my negligence or even noticed, which oddly made me worse. I started taking Samarkand jobs during business hours and derived an odd sense of satisfaction from this petty time theft. Meanwhile, during the evenings, I continued to work late into the night on my spurned project, refining certain features, adding others. Some part of me thought there was still hope that the work, if done right, would speak for itself, even if I couldn’t speak for it.
The last time Vivian and I went out together in San Francisco was a chilly Saturday morning in July. She wanted to visit the California Academy of Sciences, a science museum in Golden Gate Park. I particularly enjoyed the Neotropical rainforest dome, which featured a transparent observation tunnel that simulated the flooded forest floor; you could look up and see cichlids darting through the roots of a mangrove cluster. Then we hit the aquarium and, after that, the Morrison Planetarium.
Vivian and I stepped inside of the planetarium’s vast, chilly auditorium and used the dim orange glow of the walkways to find two seats near the center. The seventy-five-foot digital dome loomed gray and inert over us, triggering a flutter of childhood wonder. Then the lights dimmed and a program called Searching for Solar Systems began. Suddenly we were enveloped in darkness; with an orchestral flourish, the image of the earth as a blue and solitary sphere appeared on-screen. A soothing voice-over waxed poetic about the comfort we can find in our cosmic insignificance. The perspective panned out to our solar system, then wheeled through space to neighboring and distant galaxies. I glanced over at Vivian, whose spellbound expression told me that she was as captivated as I was.
After the program ended, the other visitors filed out while Vivian and I stayed behind for a while. The program had triggered a memory, and in the comfortable dark and quiet of the room I found myself telling it to her. I was eleven years old sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, and everyone was in high spirits because I’d brought home a good report card.
“Of course,” my dad beamed. “Thank your mother. In China, everybody says the boy gets their intelligence from the mom. Your mom was always top of our class. Number one or number two every time.”
“And I still ended up with you!” she laughed.
We were in the middle of our astronomy unit in science class, and that night I couldn’t stop regurgitating everything I had learned in class about how there were diamond showers on Jupiter and the fact that eighty-five percent of the universe was made of dark matter. I must have talked for twenty minutes straight, encouraged by my parents’ patient, glowing faces. After we were finished, my dad announced he was going out to get some supplies. He knocked on my door later that night with a present. It was a home planetarium the size of a soccer ball. He turned off the lights and plugged it in; with a soft whir, the projector clicked to life and cast constellations on my bedroom wall. We stayed like that until past midnight. He showed me the famous constellations—Orion, Ursa Major, the Big Dipper—and told me the stories, in Chinese, behind each.
When I thought about my dad, I explained to Vivian, I always pictured him hunched over the desk in his study. He was an introverted, maybe even aloof guy who liked working late in his R&D lab at Xerox. Even when he was home, he was usually holed up in his study tinkering with something, so growing up I rarely actually spent time with him. It was nice to remember the planetarium, I said.
I ended my story there and Vivian turned to face me in the dark. I was suddenly aware of how close she was to me; we stayed like that for a second, maybe two, and I thought about kissing her. Then the glowing orange lights of the walkway came back on and we left the auditorium.
We went to the de Young Museum café for a snack and ordered meze and espresso. When the drinks arrived, Vivian asked me to explain to her, this time in more detail, the project I had been so busy with. I took a pen from my pocket and drew a diagram for her on a napkin.
“One of the biggest problems with autonomous driving right now is that cars need to ‘see’ their surroundings with a great amount of detail and the sheer volume of data is overwhelming,” I explained. “And very, very expensive to collect. Which is why you sometimes see those SUVs driving around San Francisco with giant spinning metal boxes on the roof. That box is called a LIDAR and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So, it’s no good for your average consumer.”
I drew the LIDAR for her—a spinning metal cylinder mounted on a sturdy base, shooting lasers out onto the road. “Because LIDAR is so expensive, some people have proposed using simple, everyday cameras instead. But the problem here is that cameras are too ‘blurry’ for fast-changing road situations.
“But what if there was a way around that?” I said, drawing a road filled with cars driving underneath a cartoon cloud. Then I added little dotted lines between the cloud and each car. “For the past two years, I’ve been creating a protocol that will take data from every car’s cameras and aggregate them to model a highly accurate 3D map that does better than LIDAR. I call it ‘multinodal aggregation.’ The cars beam their data up to the cloud over 5G, and the cloud beams it right back. This way cost and latency are both minimized.”
“Amazing,” Vivian murmured. “A decentralized, real-time data platform for AV vision. When do you think the technology will be ready for the market?”
“Not for a few years, at least,” I said, my voice faltering a little. “That’s the thing. The problem with my idea is that it’ll require an overall unification within the industry. All of the data that the cars collect has to be in the same format, so there are all sorts of regulatory challenges. It’s a little utopian. And also 5G isn’t good and reliable enough yet to support the required latency and uptime. You don’t want there to be a signal outage and for all the self-driving cars to suddenly go blind. So in some sense what I’m describing to you is still highly theoretical.
“But I’ve been ‘testing’ this idea independently,” I continued, “by posting some of the code, just bits and pieces, over Samarkand, to get some feedback. You’ve probably seen some of these posts.”
“Yes, I have.”
“And people love it. The feedback has been great. So, I feel confident that the idea will work. In fact, I’m almost certain that this is the future of the industry. The only problem is I’m a couple years early.” I stopped there, because it occurred to me that I was starting to sound a little like my dad, who’d always felt like someone who was stuck in the wrong timeline.
“What did your boss say when you presented this to him?” Vivian asked.
“He didn’t say anything at all,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t even get to present it to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I packaged all of my work together and sent it to him in an email six weeks ago, but when I tried to bring it up he just started talking about something else.”
“Well, have you tried scheduling another meeting with him? This is too significant of a breakthrough to get buried.”
“Kind of. Not really. Look, I just didn’t think it was worth pursuing. These guys at GM, they’re not like me at all. They don’t really care about technology or changing the way people live. They just want to get home by five o’clock every night and make the same driving machine over and over again.”
Vivian leaned in across the table and clutched my hand. “Michael, I’m so sorry to hear that. Don’t let this discourage you; your colleagues are just too shallow-minded to appreciate your vision. You need to find your people. I’m just thinking about what you said about 5G and industry-wide unification—this feels like an idea that would get more traction in China. In China, if Beijing wants something to happen, it gets done the next day. You know, unless I’m misremembering, I think my uncle Bo works in this field. I can give him a call—maybe you guys can have a chat or something, just to get another perspective. I think you’d like talking to him.”
I looked into her eyes, which told me she meant what she said—that she believed in me—and felt something dormant and hopeful stirring in my chest. “Why not,” I said. “Sure. I think I’d like that.” We finished our meal, then I got the check and dropped Vivian back off at the Four Seasons. After that, I went back to my apartment and worked furiously on my project until the early hours of the morning.